I feel pretty safe calling myself a power user, but on Wednesday night I just sat in front of my Windows 10 desktop and almost punched my new 34′ LCD display as my desktop decided to reboot itself. To say that I was frustrated was an understatement. I was in the middle of working on numerous consulting projects… to add insult to injury the update took almost 4 minutes to apply to my desktop. This on a machine that usually boots to the desktop from a cold start in 15 seconds (benefits of having a high end desktop).

It’s now Friday and I finally have some time to try and figure out what actually happened? Why did my Windows 10 desktop up and reboot itself, seemingly applying some type of update. I had received an odd reboot dialog box earlier in the evening and had declined it. Looking at the system log I can see the reboot request;

Well, lets take care of this once and for all… thankfully I’ve been working on my Powershell kung-fu. I dump the list of all install software via Get-AppxPackage, found the package name for Candy Crush Soda Saga and issued the following in Powershell;

I recently took on the responsibility of managing and re-building the Windows Server team. Thanks to Microsoft Security Patch KB3002657 last week was a true adventure in both patch management and change control. It was discovered that several Windows Domain Controllers were missing some critical security patches so it was decided, rather haphazardly, to patch those Domain Controllers immediately. You can guess the chaos that shortly ensued afterwards. The catch – the issue wasn’t with the Domain Controllers that needed to be patched but rather with a legacy Windows 2003 Domain Controller (older physical box) that was left to authenticate requests while the other Domain Controllers rebooted. Unknowingly KB3002657 had been applied to this legacy Windows 2003 Domain Controller automatically by WSUS on the prior Thursday but no issues had been detected at that time because the other Domain Controllers in the Site had been authenticating requests for Microsoft Outlook MAC Clients, IIS and SharePoint. We originally suspected the Domain Controllers that had just been patched but quickly ruled them out and were able to determine which Domain Controller was failing to properly authenticate NTLM requests.

It doesn’t help that Windows 2003 Server is End of Support on July 15, 2015.

I do a lot of cut and pasting back and forth between various windows as I work throughout the day. It becomes really tedious when I need to cut & paste multiple items between two windows but can’t just highlight everything I need in a single action. That’s where I found Ditto to be a super useful tool. I can copy multiple different objects, it’s usually just text I’m working with, and then paste all three of those to a new window by using a few keyboard shortcuts. There no need for me to jump back and forth between the windows multiple times as I select and copy, move the mouse to the new window and then paste. Instead I can just copy, copy, copy and then move to the new window and paste, paste, paste.

Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, …..

I personally use Ctrl – 1 through Ctrl – 5 for my keyboard shortcuts which correspond to buffer positions 1 – 5, I usually don’t use more than five. When I want to paste the last item I copied I can either use the Windows default of Ctrl – V or Ctrl – Insert, or I can use Ctrl – 1. When I want to paste the second to last item I copied I can use Ctrl -2 and so on.

About two years ago I went looking for some utility to help me manage my home multi monitor Windows 7 desktop – I have 2 27″ ASUS LCD Monitors each with a resolution of 1920 x 1080, combining for a total of 3840 x 1080. I actually prefer the lower resolution since age has started to catch up with me – we all can’t be 20 something or 30 something forever. I usually have no less than 10 different windows open at any one time always trying to maximize my desktop utilization while saving my eyes and head/neck from the strain of having to cover to much ground – very inefficient. I stumbled upon a review for DisplayFusion from BinaryFortress while searching the Internet and I’m still a fan 2 years later.

While doing some research for this post I discovered that you can purchase DisplayFusion from Steam. I thought Steam only sold games but I guess why would they limit themselves to just games. Why not leverage their platform and client to deliver any type of application. Brilliant!

WallpaperFusion is a companion website where users can upload their own custom wallpapers to share with the entire community. There are some incredible looking wallpaper backgrounds on that site and they make it super simple to install through DisplayFusion.

We utilize Juniper’s Network Connect client to provide connectivity over a broadband Internet connection for all our remote call center agents. We recently had an issue where the Network Connect client couldn’t enable it’s GINA integration with Windows XP. The GINA automatically launches the Network Connect sign-in function at every Windows user sign-in. This provides the users a single sign-on capability to both log into Windows XP and establish remote connectivity.

Upon our first connection to the Juniper SSL Secure Access appliance we were prompted to install the Network Connect client. During that installation the client prompted us to enable the GINA functionality but then returned the following error, “Network Connect is configured to start when Windows starts, but this function cannot be enabled due to a conflict with another Windows application (nc.windows.app.23679)”.

We currently use both PointSec and Courion internally so I originally suspected one of these application although I quickly discovered that neither of these applications where installed. So I fired up Regedit and went looking to see which GINA was installed other than the default Microsoft GINA.

Under the GinaDLL registry key I found “awgina.dll” configured which is the GINA for Symantec’s pcAnywhere. I deleted the registry key (while pcAnywhere was installed we weren’t using it’s GINA capabilities) , uninstalled the Juniper Network Connect client and rebooted the laptop. I ran back through the installation again was this time I was successfully able to enable the GINA capabilities of the Network Connect client. I’m not 100% sure that you need to remove the client and re-install it although that was the safest course of action at the time for me.